Amanda Knox Home: 5 Surprising Not-Guilty Verdicts

By IBT Staff Reporter On 10/05/11 AT 11:33 AM

Casey Anthony was 22 when the remains of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee, were found buried in the woods in Orlando, Fla., in 2008. Caylee’s grandmother, Cindy Anthony, had reported her missing after not seeing her for a month and being unable to get a straight answer from Casey as to her whereabouts.
The evidence against Casey Anthony seemed solid. A forensic expert testified that the results of air testing in the trunk of Anthony’s car were “consistent with a decompositional event,” backing up Cindy Anthony’s statement to investigators after Caylee’s disappearance that Casey’s trunk smelled like a dead body. There was also evidence of chloroform in the trunk, and prosecutors told the court that Casey Anthony had done 84 Web searches for the term “chloroform.”
Anthony’s attorneys argued that Caylee had drowned accidentally and that Casey had panicked and hid the body. They said she had lied to investigators about Caylee’s whereabouts because of childhood trauma, including sexual abuse by her father, although they did not present any evidence of that.
In the end, the jury -- which was chosen from outside the Orlando area and sequestered throughout the trial because of the overwhelming media attention -- concluded that there was not enough evidence to convict Anthony of murder, manslaughter or child abuse. They found her guilty only of four counts of lying to investigators. The verdict shocked the millions of people who had followed the trial, many of whom said the jury interpreted the term “reasonable doubt” too strictly. Anthony was released from prison and, facing death threats, went to live in an undisclosed location. Photo: Reuters

On March 30, 1982, John Hinckley took a cab to the Washington Hilton hotel, where President Ronald Reagan was scheduled to speak. As Reagan left the hotel to return to his limousine, Hinckley called out to him and fired six shots. Three hit other officials, one hit a building, one hit the limousine, and the sixth hit Reagan in the chest, almost killing him. Two hours of emergency surgery saved his life.
In a letter sent just before the shooting, Hinckley wrote that he wanted to assassinate President Reagan in order to impress the actress Jodie Foster. Based on that, as well as two subsequent suicide attempts while awaiting trial, Hinckley’s lawyers pursued an insanity defense. They argued that, based on his score on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, there was a one-in-a-million chance that he did not have a serious mental illness. The prosecution agreed that Hinckley suffered from personality disorder, but maintained that he was not psychotic and was fully able to understand the consequences of his actions.
The jury deliberated for three days before finding Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity on all 13 counts with which he was charged. The ruling shocked the country and led to fundamental reform of the rules surrounding the insanity defense. Most importantly, the burden of proof was shifted from the prosecution to the defense: in other words, it is now up to the defense to prove insanity, not up to the prosecution to prove sanity, as it was in Hinckley’s case. Photo: Reuters

The video shocked the nation: a group of Los Angeles police officers brutally beating a black man, Rodney King, before arresting him. King was driving drunk on March 2, 1991, when he was pulled over for speeding. He resisted arrest, even getting up and trying to repel the officers after being hit twice with a Taser stun gun, and two of the five officers on the scene -- Laurence Powell and Timothy Wind -- began to beat him into submission. For about a minute and a half, they hit King more than 50 times with their metal batons and kicked him several times. A third officer, Theodore Briseno, stomped on his shoulder, knocking King’s head against the asphalt.
Most of the incident was captured on video by George Holliday, a Los Angeles resident who filmed it from his apartment. Holliday gave the tape to KTLA, a local television station, which ran it on the evening news, and it spread rapidly from there. The public was horrified at the force used by the police, and even the Los Angeles police chief, Daryl Gates, called it “very, very extreme.” The anger was further stoked by messages found on the police officers’ in-car computers. Powell wrote, “I haven’t beaten anyone this bad in a long time,” and a fourth officer, Stacey Koon, wrote, “U just had a big time use of force. Tased and beat the suspect of CHP pursuit.”
Lawyers for the police officers asked the California Court of Appeals to change the trial venue from the heavily black Los Angeles County to the white, conservative Simi Valley. They also managed to get Judge Bernard Kamins removed from the trial for “bias.” Finally, they ensured that the jury included no black members. Two jurors were members of the National Rifle Association and two were military veterans, leading the head prosecutor, Terry White, to say, “Everyone seemed very pro-police. They all seemed to come from the same background.”
With that jury, what had seemed like a cut-and-dry case -- Holliday’s video showed the beating very clearly -- became uncertain. The prosecution portrayed King as a violent suspect and characterized the police response as legitimate self-defense. In the end, the jury acquitted Wind, Briseno and Koon of all charges, and Powell of all but one assault charge. The acquittals sparked the Los Angeles riots of 1992, which raged for five days and killed 54 people. Photo: Reuters

An already sensational case became even more so because of whom it involved: O.J. Simpson, a former NFL player and actor, who was accused of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. On the night of June 12, 1994, a man entered Simpson’s home in Los Angeles and committed the brutal murders, nearly beheading Simpson and stabbing Goldman about 30 times.
After investigating, the police issued a warrant for O.J. Simpson’s arrest, and he was supposed to turn himself in the following morning -- but he didn’t. The police ended up chasing Simpson’s car through Orange County in a nationally televised spectacle before finally arresting him. They found a loaded gun, $8,750 in cash, a passport and a false beard and mustache in the car.
Like so many other cases, this one seemed cut-and-dry, but the prosecutors made a number of strategic mistakes. First, they had a choice between two districts in which to file the case, and they chose the more racially diverse district -- a decision that warded off accusations of racism but may have reduced the chances of conviction for Simpson, who is black. They also did not seek the death penalty. If they had, then potential jurors who opposed the death penalty would have been excluded from the trial, and the jury might have been more likely to convict Simpson. Also, fearing accusations of racism, the prosecutors chose not to use most of their “peremptory challenges,” which would have allowed them to mold the racial and gender composition of the jury to their liking.
The trial was the longest in California history, and the jury was sequestered for the whole time because of the intense media attention to the case. Finally, they acquitted Simpson of all charges, to the outrage of many viewers. In a subsequent civil case accusing Simpson of causing wrongful deaths, Simpson lost and was forced to pay more than $30 million in damages, but the acquittal in the criminal trial meant he never faced jail time. Years later, he published a book titled “If I Did It,” which confirmed many people’s suspicions that he had, in fact, committed the murders. Today, that conclusion is largely accepted, but because of double-jeopardy laws, Simpson will never be punished for the killings. Photo: Reuters

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Amanda Knox is home in Seattle, less than two days after an Italian appeals court acquitted her of murder in the 2007 death of her former roommate, Meredith Kercher.

Reactions to the ruling were mixed, with some people expressing fury that an attractive white woman got off while all the blame fell on a black man, Rudy Guede, and others arguing that the evidence had never been strong enough to convict Knox in the first place.